Tag | Windows Posts

This Christmas our household got its first Android devices. They were a couple of off-brand tablets and I have come to hate them. We bought them because they were cheaper. In this post I will be looking at this from an average consumer perspective. What was the experience and how does it affect my view of the platform. The main issue is the ability to download apps. This particular tablet did not come with the Google Play Store app. Instead it came with a link to download the Amazon Store app. I ...

I recently created a DLL and I wanted to reference it from a project I was developing in Visual Studio. In previous versions of Windows, doing so was simply a matter of dropping the DLL file in the C:\Windows\assembly folder. That would add the DLL to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and make it accessible in Visual Studio. However, as is often the case, Window 7 is different. Even if you have Administrator privileges on your machine, you still do not have permission to drop a file in the assembly ...

Today I am bashing around with nasm again… some useful things I found… Set the current working directory of gvim to the current file path I have found setting the current working directory of gvim to the file location is very useful, especially if you are wanting to use commands in gvim to run your compiled code. It can be done by typing in the following in the command mode in gvim… cd %:p:h Once you have set it, you can use the ! to run commands you would normally run in the dos shell.. e.g. !dir ...

I encountered the R Language recently with O'Reilly books and while from the context I knew it was a language for dealing with statistics, doing a web search for the support web site was futile. However I have now located the web site and it is at http://www.r-project.org/R is a free language available for a number of platforms including windows. CRAN mirrors are available at a number of locations worldwide.Here is the official description:"R is a language and environment for statistical computing ...

The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it. I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field. The OS took like a fish to water. I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck ...

This is Easter weekend, and the end of the school year is looming closer! Our developer sessions at WashU end today. Students will turn their spare time focus to finals and getting home for the summer. Over this short course of time, we’ve had a bit over 50 students show some level of interest in developing apps for Windows Phone. Currently the total apps submitted by students is approaching about 20. Several students have received new phones as part of their agreement to submit applications ...

Hello folks, Recently I got involved in a project for building a demo application for one of our customers with Kinect for Windows. Yes, something similar what Tom Cruise did in the movie Minority Report. Waving arms, moving stuff around, swipes, speech recognition, manipulating computer screens without even touching it. Pretty cool!!! The idea in the movie showed us how technology would be after 50 years from that day. Minority Report Movie clip. Well, that 50 years of time frame got squeezed and ...

After reading this section you should be able to Understand network management and the importance of documentation, baseline measurements, policies, and regulations to assess and maintain a network’s health. Manage a network’s performance using SNMP-based network management software, system and event logs, and traffic-shaping techniques Identify the reasons for and elements of an asset managements system Plan and follow regular hardware and software maintenance routines Fundamentals of Network Management ...

If you installed the latest MVVM Light version for Windows 8, you may encounter an issue where code snippets are not displayed correctly in the Intellisense popup. I am working on a fix, but for now here is how you can solve the issue manually.

Last week I had a pleasure to speak at the Microsoft’s Developer Days 2012 in Sophia, Bulgaria. It was a great conference and I met lots of cool people there. I did a session about Kinect Hacking. My goal was to give a good understanding of Kinect inner workings, how it can be used to develop Windows applications. Later I showed examples of interesting projects utilizing the full potential the Kinect sensor. Below you can find my slides and source code of one of the demos (the one where “Szymon went ...

Effective immediately, new compute and storage resource options are now available when selecting data center options in the Windows Azure Portal. "West US" and "East US" options are now available, for Compute and Storage. SQL Azure options for these two data centers will be available in the next few months. The official announcement can be found here.In terms of geo-replication:US East and West are paired together for Windows Azure Storage geo-replicationUS North and South are paired together for ...

Our West Palm Beach Developer Group March 2012 meeting featured Herve Roggero, Azure MVP and co-founder of Pyn Logic. Herve covered multiple case studies on migrating existing application to SQL Azure. This event was quiet popular filling-in our meeting room. We would like to thank PC Professor for hosting our meeting and Sherlock Technology for sponsoring our free food. Our April 24th, 2012 meeting will feature Will Tartak who will be demonstrating how he used ServiceStack.net to quickly develop ...

Introduction I’m currently working on broadening the content in the Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide. One of the features I have been looking at over the past week is the support for transactional messaging. When using the direct programming model and the WCF interface some, but not all, messaging operations can participate in transactions. This allows developers to improve the reliability of messaging systems. There are some limitations in the transactional model, transactions can only ...

I would like to invite you to a fascinating webinar on extending applications to HTML5 and Mobile that we are doing in collaboration with Jeffrey S. Hammond, Principal Analyst serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals at Forrester Research.The webinar is free and it will will introduce the substantial changes brought on by the move to Web Applications and Open Web architectures, and the challenges it places on application development shops. We’ll also introduce how we at Gizmox ...

While working on a mainframe integration project, it occurred to me that some basic computer concepts are slipping into obscurity. For example, just about anyone can tell you that a 64-bit processor is faster than a 32-bit processer. A grade school child could tell you that a computer “speaks” in ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Some people can even tell you that there are 8 bits in a byte. However, I have found that even the most seasoned developers often can’t explain the theory behind those statements. That is ...

We have been using TFS 2010 build for distributing a build in parallel on several agents, but where the actual compilation is done by a bunch of external tools and compilers, e.g. no MSBuild involved. We are using the ParallelTemplate.xaml template that Jim Lamb blogged about previously, which distributes each configuration to a different agent. We developed custom activities for running these external compilers and collecting the information and errors by reading standard out/error and pushing it ...

I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are ...

OK this is just a first post to see how Windows Live Writer works. I’m sure as I become more familiar with it the easier it will be.

I am new to the world of contracting and am finding it very similar to my permanent roles I’ve had. Anyone have any advice for a new contractor in the software development and/or software configuration management role?

MapRedux – #PowerShell and #Big Data Have you been hearing about “big data”, “map reduce” and other large scale computing terms over the past couple of years and been curious to dig into more detail? Have you read some of the Apache Hadoop online documentation and unfortunately concluded that it wasn't feasible to setup a “test” hadoop environment on your machine? More recently, I have read about some of Microsoft’s work to enable Hadoop on the Azure cloud. Being a "Microsoft"-leaning technologist, ...

For the last decade, I have repeatedly, in my imitable Microsoft fan boy style, offered an alternative view to commonly held beliefs about Microsoft's stance on open source licensing. In earlier times, leading figures in Microsoft were very vocal in resisting the idea that commercial licensing is outmoded or morally reprehensible. Many people interpreted this as all-out corporate opposition to open source licensing. I never read it that way. It is true that I've met individual employees of Microsoft ...

So, day 1 of DevWeek. Lots and lots of Windows 8 and WinRT, as you would expect. The keynote had some actual content in it, fleshed out some of the details of how your apps linked into the Metro infrastructure, and confirmed that there would indeed be an enterprise version of the app store available for Metro apps.) However, that's, not what I want to focus this post on. What I do want to focus on is this: Windows 8 does not make .NET developers obsolete. Phew! .NET in the New Ecosystem In all the ...

Everyone loves naming conventions and product code names :) I’ve see a few people mislead by blogs and so called “.com press” to the point of confusion about what Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh and Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 actually are in reality. So let’s clarify: Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh – is the name of the refresh update to Windows Phone OS that allows for broad reach to new markets and languages, previously not supported in Windows Phone 7.5 OS. This update also provides support for market specific ...

In my last blog I talked about a new WP7 utility application. My intention at the time was to build a Wi-Fi strength meter, but after some research, I discovered that Microsoft has that part of the phone sandboxed. Its not a big deal now, but I hope they unlock those features in a future update as it could lead to some real cool applications. So what now? Well at first, I felt I was at a crossroads on application ideas. I still plan to release Mixtio Reader, but until I get some other issues worked ...

Introduction I’ll be presenting a session at Sweden Windows Azure Group (SWAG) on Monday, as well as presenting on the Windows Azure Service Bus at various other events. I thought it would be fun to look at implementing some of the Enterprise Integration Patterns using the brokered messaging capabilities. I’ll use this article in the next release of Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide, and it will probably end up as a “challenge lab” for my Service Bus course. As a long-time BizTalk developer ...

In my previous post I introduced the architecture of message bus based system, the dispatcher mode and the pulling mode. I also explained a bit about the channel mode and transport extensibility of WCF. And then, in order to make the following sample simple and easy to use I created an in process and in memory message bus. In this post, I will demonstrate how to create a WCF transport extension over this memory message bus, for the most common MEP – Request Reply mode. Before we go to the implementation, ...

Cloud computing gives us more flexibility on the computing resource, we can provision and deploy an application or service with multiple instances over multiple machines. With the increment of the service instances, how to balance the incoming message and workload would become a new challenge. Currently there are two approaches we can use to pass the incoming messages to the service instances, I would like call them dispatcher mode and pulling mode. Dispatcher Mode The dispatcher mode introduces ...

I have seen many Sharepoint Newbies cracking their head to create a Console/Windows application in VS2010 and make it talk to Sharepoint 2010 Server. I had the same problem when i started with Sharepoint in the begining. It is important for you to acknowledge that SharePoint 2010 is based on .NET Framework version 3.5 and not version 4.0. In VS 2010 when you create a Console/Windows application, Make Sure you select .Net Framework 3.5 in the New Project Dialog Window.If you have missed while creating ...

LAN parties offer the enjoyment of head to head gaming in a real-life social environment. In general, they are experiencing decline thanks to the convenience of Internet gaming, but Kenton Varda is a man who takes his LAN gaming very seriously. His LAN gaming house is a fascinating project, and best of all, Linux plays a part in making it all work.Varda has done his own write ups (short, long), so I'm only going to give an overview here. The setup is a large house with 12 gaming stations and a single ...

In my early development days, I used Microsoft Access for building databases. It made things easy since I only needed to package the database with the installation package so my clients would have access to it. When we began the development of a new package in Visual Studio .NET I decided to use SQL Server Express. It was free and provided good tools - also free. I thought it was a tremendous idea until it came time to distribute our new software! What a surprise. The nightmare Ah, the choices! Detach ...

Figuring out which software licensing options best suit your needs while being cost-effective can be confusing. Some businesses end up making their purchases through retail stores which means they miss out on volume licensing opportunities and others may unknowingly be using unlicensed software which means their business may be at risk. So let me help you make the best decision for your situation. You may want to review this blog post that lays out licensing basics for any organization that needs ...

You’ve likely heard about how Office 365 and Windows Intune are great applications to get you started with Cloud Computing. Many of you emailed me asking for more info on what Cloud Computing is, including the distinction between "Public Cloud" and "Private Cloud". I want to address these questions and help you get started. Let's begin with a brief set of definitions and some places to find more info; however, an excellent place where you can always learn more about Cloud Computing is the Microsoft ...

Learning Outcomes Explain the advantages of using a large number of registers Discuss the way in which compilers optimize register usage Discuss the evolution of CISC machines Describe the characteristics of RISC architecture Discuss the RISC vs. CISC controversy Describe the way in which RISC and CISC design principles can be combined Instruction Execution Characteristics To understand the the line of reasoning of RISC advocates, we need a brief overview of instruction execution characteristics. ...

With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview version out in the open and the Visual Studio 11 Beta also available, I’ve been putting some more effort into trying them both out. The first impression of the new Visual Studio 11 build was: Why doesn’t it work at all on Windows 8?! The issues I encountered were odd to say the least. Visual Studio did install correctly, which was a good sign, but when I started it, I was greeted with a multitude of popups each telling me that some package could not be loaded. ...

One of my favorite Code Camps, and not only because it’s only an hour or so away, but because it’s Orlando, Florida! session name: Metro Design Language - WP7 & Windows "8" speaker:Nikita Polyakov level:100 description:Metro Design Language key concepts and ideas around Metro design as it is used in Windows Phone, Windows "8", and even XBOX. We will take a look at different templates available for each platform.ANDname: Intro to Dynamic Prototyping w/ SketchFlow speaker: Nikita Polyakov level: ...

If you are installing SharePoint 2010 on a new box you might see the Setup Errors notification from the installer. In my case, I am using Windows Server 2008 R2, but I have seen the similar Error on Windows 7 as well with little less requirements. As you can understand all the “-“ bullets are the requirements that needs to be installed or configured on the box. There are two ways to do this 1) Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Product Preparation tool In the SharePoint 2010 Splash Form, you can find that ...

In my attempt of installing and configuring SharePoint 2010 Farm, I have given a new Windows Server 2008 R2 box that should have SQL Server 2008. So when I attempt to install SQL Server 2008 on it, I came across the following error message. Not so weird because every server product have a set of requirement to be installed. First off, before you do any thing Just run the Windows Update. That’s recommended because there can be some thing else that is not mention in this post or any other but can hanged ...

I recently deployed an MVC application to our production Windows 2003 Server and received an error that plagued me for longer then I care to admit. The error manifested when the Infragistics data grid attempted to render. The header would render, but the data area was empty and the waiting icon appeared and stayed.The script error associated with the problem is: The remote request to fetch data has failed: (parsererror) 'JSON' is undefinedIt turns out that the default compatibility settings in Internet ...

I've downloaded Windows Identity Foundation from http://www.microsoft.com/do... when I was trying to install, it returned ---------------------------... Update Standalone Installer------------------... encountered an error: 0x80070003The system cannot find the path specified.-----------------... tried a few other similar downloads, and all had the same error,Finally I’ve realized, that they don’t want to run from shared ...

I’ll be presenting a session on “Windows Azure Service Bus” for the Sweden Windows Azure Group (SWAG) at AddSkills in Stockholm on the 26th March. It will be a demo intensive session looking at the relayed and brokered messaging capabilities of the Service Bus. Register for the event here. Sign up to Sweden Windows Azure Group (SWAG) for notifications of future events here. Read more about the Windows Azure Service Bus in my e-book “Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide” ...

I wanted to let everyone know that my flagship application Mixtio Reader will be delayed. I was shooting for the end of the first quarter, but it looks like it will take longer. Mixtio Reader will probably be released around the second or third quarter. I am working on this project in my spare time and with the scale of this project being what it is, its going slow. I am currently waiting on some third party sdk’s that will be used and the remaining parts are all custom. This was suppose to be my ...

It is with some sadness that I write this post as my last for the Redmond Diary blog on the Redmond Developer News and Visual Studio Magazine Web sites. Eleven days ago, I started a new blog for ZDNet covering Big Data, at http://zdnet.com/blog/big-d... There’s been a ton of interest around Big Data in the industry lately and the topic ties into the database and BI work that I’ve done throughout most of my career. So when I was asked to write the blog, I really couldn’t say no. I agreed to write ...

The new HTML standard is part of a proliferation of challenges and opportunities that developers face today: Browser Wars v2.0 Going back 10 years ago, Internet Explorer could claim 95% of the browser market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wi... Today you have to include IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari to get past the 95% support mark (http://marketshare.hitslin... And this only includes desktop browsers! Safari, the Android browser and Opera all have strong market shares in the mobile/tablet ...